Bill pay overview

In the Bills tab, all submissions will take on one of four states:

• Unpaid: Bills that are past due, that have been drafted but not scheduled for payment, or that require approval. Under Unpaid, a bill can fall into these statuses :
  • Requires approval: The bill requires approval from an admin/approver. If no approval is given, the bill cannot be paid out to the vendor.
    • Approval required: The bill requires approval from an admin or by a user with approval permissions.
    • Approved: Short-term state while status is updated
    • Denied: Short-term state while status is updated
  • Past due: The due date of the bill has already passed.
    • Past due: The date that the bill should have been paid out to a vendor has passed, but the bill hasn’t been paid.
    • Duplicate: We detected a duplicate of this bill.
  • Drafts: A draft bill is a preliminary version of the final bill you want to create.
    • Missing information: More information is needed.
    • Draft complete: All information for the bill is complete and it can be scheduled for payment.
    • Duplicate: We detected a duplicate of this bill.
• In progress: Bills that are processing or scheduled to be paid out at a later date. Under In Progress, a bill can take on these statuses:
  • Processing: The bill is in the process of being paid out to the vendor.
  • Scheduled: The bill has been approved by an admin or by a user with the permission to approve requests and is scheduled to be paid out.
• Paid: Paid bills. A bill can fall into these statuses:
  • Processed: The bill payment is completed.
  • Paid externally: The bill has been marked as paid externally.
• Canceled: Canceled or returned bills.
  • Canceled: The bill wasn’t able to be paid out to the vendor because it was canceled.
  • Denied: The draft bill was denied by your admin or by a user with this permission.

Vendor spend limits will be used to pay bills and are associated with the one company policy.

Vendor-specific spend limits can be created using any type of spend limit template.

You can connect an external bank account in advance of paying your bill the same way you’d connect an external bank to fund your Brex business account. Once connected, you can choose it from the Account dropdown when you pay a bill.

If you haven’t already connected an external bank account, you can do so as you go through the process to pay a bill. When choosing a funding source from the Account dropdown, click Add external account, instead. From here, you can either choose to connect the bank account using your sign-in credentials or account/routing number.

Step 1: Go to Bills > Pay a bill. Step 2: Under Bill details, fill out the following information:

• Legal name: The legal entity or name of the vendor you want to send payment to.
• Recipient email: The email address of the person you want to notify when payment is sent. Toggle the button on or off to enable or disable this setting.
• Spend limit: The spend limit that the vendor’s payment will be pulled from.
• Account: The Brex business account or external bank account that will fund the vendor’s payment.
• Payment type: The payment type you’ll use to pay the vendor. This can be an ACH (1-2 business days), domestic wire (0-1 business days), international wire (1-2 business days), or check (7-10 business days).
  • The beneficiary depositing a check is the one that drives the check’s processing time. Because of this, processing times can vary.
• Payment details: The vendor information that you’ll remit payment to. Vendor information should include the routing number, account number, account type, and country.
• Due date: (Optional) The date the bill is due.
• Bill date: (Optional) The date to accrue the expense.
• ERP payment account: (Optional) The account is imported from your ERP. We currently support NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Xero. If you do not see these options and believe you should, please reach out to your sales rep or Brex Support.
• Send on: The date you would like this bill to be sent on.
• Repeat payment: Toggle on or off whether this payment should repeat in the future.

Note: When you upload an invoice, we’ll use AI to pre-fill the text from the invoice to the fields. If AI reads these fields incorrectly, you can manually adjust them to reflect the correct information. Please make sure the fields are filled out correctly for any field with an orange lightning bolt beside it (indicating it’s been pre-filled). Step 3: Once these fields are filled out, click Next. Step 4: (Optional) To save and return to this bill, click Save and leave. This creates a draft bill that you can revisit later in Bills > Unpaid > Drafted. Step 5: You’ll see a confirmation window summarizing your input. If you need to make any changes, click Back. If all the information looks correct, click Schedule to schedule the invoice for payment. If you’ve established an approval chain, the approver will be notified to sign off on the bill. Until fully approved, you can find the bill in Bills > Unpaid. Once fully approved, you can find all of your scheduled payments in Bills > In progress > Processing.

You can send an email invoice to your Brex account by using a unique Brex email address assigned to your account. Account admins, card admins, bookkeepers, as well as any other users with bill drafting permissions, can find this email address in Bills > Add invoices from email. You can also email bills to bills@brex.com to have them prepared as draft bills in your account from a registered user email on your Brex account. You can then forward emailed invoices from your inbox to this address or provide this unique bill pay email to your vendors so they can send the invoice to Brex directly. The invoices should either be an attached file (png, pdf, jpeg, or jpg) or described in the email body. Invoices added from emails will go directly into Drafts. A new bill is drafted with complete or incomplete information based on AI accuracy and required details, which you can then submit. By default, account and card admins receive a notification whenever a bill is created from email. This lets you know that the bill is ready to review, or notifies you if the bill is missing information. You can click Review draft from within the notification to finalize your bill. If you want to modify which alerts you receive in relation to bill submissions, go to Tasks > Alerts. Some of the alerts you can modify include bill payment failures/reasons, requests to review a bill payment, confirmation that a bill payment request was submitted, bill payment denials, and bill payment approvals. Here are some tips to help make sure that your bill submission is successful:

• Only attach one invoice per email.
• Do not add any other recipients to the email (including in the CC or BCC field).
• Add the invoice as an attachment, as opposed to pasting directly into the email.
• The invoice needs to be in English and denominated in $USD.
• Make sure that you’re the appropriate role type for the action you’re trying to take.

Step 1: Go to Bills > Pay a vendor/ Pay a bill > Browse files. Step 2: When prompted, upload an invoice from your computer. You can either choose the file name or drag and drop the file. Step 3: Save the draft. You’ll now see it logged in your dashboard in Bills > Unpaid > Drafted.

Just as you can forward an invoice via email to pay a bill, you can also forward or have your vendor send an email to create a draft invoice for payment later. To do this, follow the steps in the email section of Pay a bill above, but do not submit the bill.

You can approve or deny bill payments directly from your email without signing in to your Brex account. Step 1: In the email, click View payment. Step 2: Click Approve or Deny. Step 3: If you choose to deny a payment, you’ll need to provide a reason for your denial of the bill payment and select whether you’d like to notify the submitter.

To review multiple bill payments more efficiently, sign in to your Brex dashboard. Step 1: In your dashboard, go to either Bills or Tasks. Step 2: Click on a bill (those labeled with Requires approval will be displayed at the top). Step 3: Select Approve or Deny. Step 4: If you choose to deny a payment, you’ll need to provide a reason for your denial of the bill payment and select whether you’d like to notify the submitter.

This can be any of your Brex business accounts. However, you might notice that your account of choice is grayed out and has an Unsupported status. There can be different causes for this, some examples of which are outlined below.

This can be a Brex business account or an external bank account. However, when choosing an external bank account, you might notice that your bank of choice is grayed out and has an Unsupported status. There can be different causes for this, some examples of which are outlined below.

If we’ve recently attempted to pull a payment from this account and it has failed, we’ll mark the account as Unsupported. Please address the original reason for the failure and reach out to us to ask us to reactivate it.

When using a Brex business account to pay your bill, accounts that don’t have enough funds to cover the payment will be marked as Unsupported. External bank accounts with insufficient funds might still be selectable, but choosing one without the funds to cover the payment will ultimately lead to the failure of the payment. Please add funds to the external account before retrying the payment, or select a different payment source.

Your account needs to be verified before you can use it as your bill payment source. You can connect your bank account directly by signing in through Plaid. In most cases, this verifies your account instantaneously. Note: We may need you to upload some additional documents to verify your external bank account, such as a bank statement. If this is the case, you’ll see a prompt to upload in your dashboard. However, if you’d rather not sign in with Plaid, or if Plaid doesn’t support your bank account, you can choose to connect via your account credentials (account and routing number). In this case, we’ll use micro-deposits to verify ownership of your bank account. Even if you’ve already connected a bank account in the past, it may not have been successfully verified, in which case you can reconnect your bank account to initiate the micro-deposit process. This method of verification involves depositing $0.01 into your external bank account. The deposit entry will reference some confirmation information, which you’ll then enter in your dashboard under Settings > Company settings > External bank connections. The process can take 1-3 business days, so if you’ve only recently connected, you’ll need to complete the verification process before using the account to pay a bill. For fastest turnaround time, please also make sure Brex has been added to your safelist.

If none of the above scenarios apply to you but your bank is still Unsupported for bill payments, please reach out to our support team.

In most cases, an external bank account without proper funds to cover your bill payment will still appear as a selectable option when choosing the account to pull the payment from. However, if you do select it, your payment will ultimately fail when we attempt to withdraw funds. Please add funds to the external bank account before retrying the payment, or select a different source of payment.